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Chapter 4: Reimagining the British Empire and America in an Age of Revolution: The Case of William Eden
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83 The early weeks of September 1778 found Frederick Howard, Earl of Carlisle , safely within the City of New York—one of the few North American cities that still professed loyalty to his king and country—contemplating the causes and implications of months of failed diplomacy. The head of a commission sanctioned by King George III, Carlisle, along with his fellow commissioners William Eden and George Johnstone,had spent the summer of 1778 traveling through the colonies of the mid-Atlantic seaboard seeking to engage the Continental Congress in negotiations that they hoped would end the now three-year-old American Revolutionary War. Although the commissioners were empowered to offer the Americans the most generous terms for reconciliation that had yet been offered during the course of the war, they were spectacularly unsuccessful. The commissioners had made a number of attempts to engage congressional delegates and ordinary Americans in some kind of dialogue,but all had come to naught.The Continental Congress had refused to even officially read their correspondence, let alone consider their terms for negotiation. Now, on September 9, 1778, Carlisle penned a private letter to Eden assessing both the reasons for their failure and the current prospects for Britain, America, and the wider world. Carlisle believed that Eden was the most obvious person to direct these concerns, as the commission that Carlisle led had largely been a product of Eden’s design.The Durham-born lawyer Eden had been a close adviser of Lord North’s since his elevation from undersecretary of state to the Board of Trade in March 1776. As an adviser of North’s,Eden directed elements of the secret service and provided North with intelligence about American affairs generally and American agents in Europe in particular. Eden’s own agents had convinced him that American support for the Revolutionary cause was not widespread,an assumption that influenced his design for the peace commission that would come to bear the Reimagining the British Empire and America in an Age of Revolution The Case of William Eden leonard j. sadosky s Leonard J. Sadosky 84 name of his friend Carlisle.Eden had proposed rewiring the circuitry of the British Empire in order to accommodate, at least in part, the Americans’ more federalized vision of the imperial constitution. Now, both Eden and Carlisle were forced to imagine the British Empire preserving itself in a new political world in which the customary bounds of diplomacy and warfare had seemingly been cast aside. In his letter of September 9 Carlisle offered Eden a chilling vision of the future that was almost apocalyptic in tone. He quite rightly perceived that the Treaty of Alliance between the United States and the Kingdom of France had changed the dynamics of the geopolitical system within which Britain and its empire had existed and within which British political leaders had made their calculations regarding political, diplomatic, and commercial policy. “The French interference gives a new colour to every thing that relates to the American contest,” Carlisle began bluntly. He made it clear that the stakes of the American War were far higher than they had been the previous year. “The Question is no longer which shall get the better, Gt. Britain or America, but whether Gt. Britain shall or shall not by every means in her power endeavour to hinder her colonies from becoming an accession of strength to her natural enemies, and destroy a connection that is contrived for our ruin and might possibly effect it,unless prevented by the most vigorous exertions on our part.” The alliance between France and the United States had thus not only expanded the operational scale of the war in America, it had transformed its political scope. Calculations that British policymakers such as Carlisle and Eden, as well as their superiors, Lord North and King George III, had made in the context of an imperial crisis would now have to be made in the context of a general inter-imperial war,a war that would be contested in what was now,given the manifest autonomy of the American states, a transformed geopolitical landscape. The accommodation of American autonomy in the wake of the FrancoAmerican Alliance provoked more than a rethinking of the North ministry’s strategy in the waging of the American War,although it certainly did provoke that. More than a simple change in military strategy, the American states’ entry into the world of European diplomacy called for...